The Hand on the Wall

by Maureen Johnson

  Why was she thinking that? She hadn’t hurt Ellie. All she had done was tell the truth about who wrote Hayes’s show. But Ellie was gone now. And Hayes. And Fenton. It suddenly didn’t seem to matter that she may have put together the pieces of the great Ellingham case. There was something happening right here, right now. Hayes, Ellie, and Fenton—they were linked together somehow. All were dead. Larry was afraid for her.

  There was a murderer here.

  She wondered if she was afraid. She asked herself the question, and it was surprisingly quiet on the subject.

  She turned off the water and let herself shiver, let herself feel.

  That message on the wall was someone telling her something. Someone wanted to play with her. So all right. She would play. Maybe she was anxious. Maybe she was untrained. But Stevie Bell knew one thing about herself—once she had bitten in, tasted the mystery—she would not let go. She had gotten herself to this mountain. She could do this. After all, people were doing this all the time now. Citizen detectives, working on cases online, at home, alone and in groups.

  She hurried back to her room, and, despite what she had just been thinking about not picking clothes up off the floor, she picked up a pair of sweatpants from the corner of the room. These were pretty clean. Ellingham did your laundry, but you had to put it in labeled bags. Stevie had not been paying enough attention to do that. She made sure to put on an extra thick coat of deodorant. She would smell good, at least. Her hair was now finger-length, sharp blond strands, crisp as wheat. The off-the-shelf bleach was strong stuff. She messed it around with her hands until it landed in basically the right position.

  Now she was focused. Now she could . . .

  Her phone rang. The number was blocked.

  “You were in town today.”

  The voice wound around her like a snake. It warmed her and chilled her at the same time. It was so close it seemed to come from inside herself.

  “Where the hell are you?” she replied.

  “So we got the hellos out of the way.” Just the sound of David’s voice was all Stevie needed to conjure David in his entirety—his curling dark hair, his slightly peaked brows, his ropy, muscled arms, his tattered T-shirts and sagging Yale sweatpants, the busted-up Rolex on his wrist. This reprobate rich boy—the kind of person she thought she would never be able to stand—strange and difficult and maybe a bit self-pitying. Someone who didn’t care what the world thought. Someone funny. Someone dangerous.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” she said, trying to sound even, almost bored, instead of breathless.

  “On vacation,” he said. “Working on my tan. Doing that thing where you surf with a dog wearing sunglasses.”

  “David,” she said. Even saying the name was hard. It exploded from her mouth. “What is happening? Why did you get yourself beaten up? Are you going to tell me?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Are you worried about me?” She could hear the smile in his voice, and it both enticed and enraged her.

  “No,” she said.

  “Liar. You are. You are worried about me and my beautiful face. I can understand that. The face is healing. The beating wasn’t as bad as it looked. I smeared the blood around.”

  “What do you want?” she said, her heart racing. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on? Or did you call just to be a dick?”

  “The second one.”

  “Seriously . . .”

  “Something I should have done a long time ago,” he replied. “All further questions should be sent in writing to my lawyer.”

  Stevie rolled her gaze to the ceiling. To her surprise, tears were forming in her eyes. Of course he was not coming back. Her whole body flooded with feeling. He was the first person she had ever kissed and done . . . other things with. Right here on this floor.

  “How did you know I was in town?” she said, coughing out the emotion. “Bathsheba?”

  “I have eyes and ears everywhere. I heard about your professor too. Bad shit.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Bad shit.”

  “Her house burned down?”

  “She left the gas on and lit a cigarette.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “A lot of bad things are happening.”

  “Yeah, no kidding.”

  She sat on the floor next to her bed and considered what to say next. Silence pulsed between them.

  “So,” she said, “what do you want? If you’re not coming back. There must be something. Unless you’re worried about me.”

  “You?” he said. “Nothing ever happens to you.”

  She didn’t know what that meant, if it was reassurance or an accusation.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” she said. “I’ll be careful if you call me back once a day.”

  “Can’t promise that,” he said.

  “What, are you in the witness protection program or something? Stop screwing around.”

  “I’m hanging up so it doesn’t get weird,” he said.

  “Too late for—”

  But he was gone. Stevie stared at her phone for a while, trying to work out what the hell had just happened, only to be startled by an alert that flashed across her phone: BLIZZARD WARNING ISSUED FOR BURLINGTON AND SURROUNDING AREA. STORM DUE TO ARRIVE IN 48 HOURS, ACCUMULATIONS UP TO 24 INCHES EXPECTED.

  Stevie put her phone down and kicked it across the floor.

  7

  AT BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING, STEVIE POKED AT A FRESHLY MADE waffle as Janelle typed furiously on her computer. Vi was reading a political science textbook. Nate was consumed by a book with a dragon on the cover.

  Stevie should have been reading as well; she had lit class in an hour and was supposed to have read The Great Gatsby by now. She had skimmed the first few chapters—something about a rich guy who threw parties and a neighbor who would watch him. She had anatomy later as well, and there was going to be an oral quiz on the skeletal system. Mr. Nelson would be back on the table, and Stevie was supposed to know the names of all his bones. She was six units behind in her self-based math and language work. Schoolwork loomed around behind her, like a big, dumb monster. If she didn’t turn around, maybe it wouldn’t bother her.

  “I sent a school-wide message,” Janelle said, snapping her computer shut.

  Stevie looked up, and syrup dripped on her hoodie as she did so.

  “Huh?” she said.

  “I’m doing a demonstration at eight. I’m inviting everyone.”

  Indeed, even as they sat there, Stevie saw the message come through on some people’s phones and computers. Mudge, from across the room, gave her a thumbs-up.

  “You know Mudge?” Stevie said.

  “Sure. He wants to be an Imagineer and make automatons and robots.”

  “It’s going to be so great!” Vi said. They were dressed that morning in red overalls, with a rainbow half shirt underneath. They had shaved some more from the sides of their silver-blond hair and spiked it high. Vi always looked alert and alive, like they had scored a direct hit off the electrical mains. Maybe that was why they were so good with Janelle. Both lived completely and brightly.

  “Have to go,” Vi said, picking up their bag. “I’ll be late to Mandarin class.”

  They kissed Janelle on the top of the head and waved to Nate and Stevie. Nate bunched up a napkin and stuck it in his empty juice glass.

  “I’d better go too,” he said.

  “Don’t you have a few hours before your first class?” Janelle said.

  “Yeah,” he replied. “I just want to go back and enjoy having the second floor to myself for a little while before this Hunter dude shows up. Hunter. Is he rugged?”

  “He studies environmental science,” Stevie replied. “He’s nice.”

  “Good,” Janelle said. “David’s gone, and a nice guy who likes the environment is moving in. Sounds like a good switch to me.”

  Janelle had never made it a secret that she wasn’t fond of David.

  “Okay,” Vi said. �
��I’ll meet you over there at six and bring you dinner and . . .”

  Vi’s phone pinged, and they picked it up.

  “Oh my God,” they said. “Oh God.”

  “What?” Janelle said.

  Stevie’s stomach lurched.

  Vi held out their phone, revealing a headline that had flashed across the screen: SENATOR EDWARD KING ANNOUNCES PRESIDENTIAL RUN.

  “He’s running,” Vi said. “I knew it. That dick.”

  Stevie had shared the secret with Janelle and Nate—they knew that David was Edward King’s son. They both looked at Stevie. Nate grabbed his tray and made a hasty exit.

  “Anyway,” Vi said, shaking their head. “Six o’clock. I’ll bring tacos if they have them.”

  When they were alone, Janelle ate some fruit salad and looked at Stevie.

  “You’ve been really quiet,” she said. “What have you been up to? Ever since we played that recording on that old machine you’ve been squirrely. And your teacher, the one from Burlington . . . What’s going on with you?”

  “It’s a lot of things,” Stevie said. “Do you remember the message that appeared on my wall that night? The dream one?”

  “Sure.”

  “I met a friend of Ellie’s in Burlington yesterday. She told me some stuff, like that Ellie knew all about the message and she thought someone put it there. Ellie thought it was real. She may have even known it was real.”

  Janelle drew her head back in surprise.

  “But who would do that?” she said. “David?”

  “I don’t think so,” Stevie said. “I mean, the only one who makes any sense at all is Hayes? Because of the video? No one really makes sense for it. But this girl said Ellie was sure it was real and that Ellie knew who did it.”

  “Well, if we find out,” Janelle said, “there will be hell to pay. No one does that to you.”

  Stevie felt a warm rush. She’d had friends at her old school—people she spoke to and sometimes texted with. But if she was being honest with herself (and she often tried not to be), she’d never really had that IRL connection. Her most real relationships had been with people on her case boards. Ellingham had provided her with that something—maybe even the something her parents had talked to her about. Friends who hung out together in pajamas and talked. Friends who listened. Friends who stood up for you.

  But she didn’t know how to express this or even if she should, so she dipped her waffle piece again.

  “Can you look inside of walls?” she asked Janelle.

  “Can I personally look inside of walls? I can do anything. But I think you’re asking if there is something that can penetrate a wall to show stuff behind it, and the answer is yes. A wall scanner. They’re pretty common. They use them to find studs, wires, pipes, things like that. Why?”

  “Just . . . wondering.”

  “Oh! I already got four replies!” Janelle said as her phone pinged. “People are going to come tonight! Oh my God. What if it doesn’t work?”

  “It works,” Stevie said.

  “Okay. I have to be calm. I’m going to class, then I’m going to run it a few times. See you there, yeah?”

  “Of course,” Stevie said.

  Janelle grabbed her things and stuffed them into her big orange bag and hurried out. Stevie got The Great Gatsby out of her bag and stared at the cover: a midnight-blue background with a woman’s face floating in it—a flapper made of light and sky, mostly eyes, with a city dripping in the background like a string of jewels. It was a little like the Ellingham family portrait by Leonard Holmes Nair, the one that hung in the Great House. It was a hallucination of person and place.

  Speaking of flappers . . . Maris was just coming into the dining hall. She was wearing a big shaggy coat of fake black fur. Maris had a lot of shaggy, fringy things. She wore lots of darks, smudgy eyeliner and strong lipsticks. Dash was with her in his oversized coat and long scarf.

  Maris and Dash were the theater people—Ellingham had only a few, and they were definitely in charge of all things dramatic now that Hayes was gone. It looked like Maris had shaken off some of her gloom after Hayes’s death. For a few weeks, she’d walked around like the town widow, wearing black on black with black lipstick, crying in the library and in the dining hall and tending to the impromptu shrine for Hayes that had sprung up in the cupola. It seemed like a lot of mourning for someone you had been dating for about a week, maybe two at the most. Maris had shed the widow’s weeds for a yellow dress—a vintage-looking one, which she wore with black fishnet stockings and chunky heels. She was doing blue lipstick now, as she transitioned back to her signature bright red.

  On the other side of the dining hall, Stevie saw Gretchen—a pianist with a head of fiery red hair. She had been Hayes’s girlfriend last year. Hayes had used her to do his work, to write his papers. He’d even borrowed five hundred dollars from her, which he’d never repaid.

  In theory, both Maris and Gretchen would have had something against Hayes. Hayes had screwed Gretchen over in several ways. And Hayes was dating Maris while also having a long-distance relationship with fellow YouTuber Beth Brave. Was that enough to kill? Also, Maris could have helped if Hayes had wanted to project that message on Stevie’s wall. Maris was smart. Maris knew theater things, so she would likely have been able to put something together to project a message.

  This thing about the message on the wall was nagging at her. What did it even mean? It was a harmless prank at best. Well, not harmless. It had caused her to have a massive panic attack. But in the scheme of things at Ellingham, it was harmless. It had not killed her.

  It wasn’t the severity of the thing; it was the why. Why do it?

  She couldn’t shake the feeling that if she could figure out the mystery of the hand on the wall, she would understand everything.

  Almost all of the incoming class took Dr. Quinn’s literature and history seminar, a class in which everyone read a novel and then learned about the historical period and context that surrounded it. The Great Gatsby was about the 1920s, a period that vaguely interested Stevie, as it had a lot of good crimes and it butted up against the Ellingham Affair in the 1930s.

  “Much is made of the green light at the end of the dock,” Dr. Jenny Quinn said. Dr. Quinn was the associate head of the school and a generally terrifying person. She strode around in front of the room. She was dressed in high, glossy pumps, a pencil skirt, and an oversized white blouse that was definitely fancy in a way Stevie could not classify. “Everyone talks about the green light at the end of the dock. But I want to focus on the circumstances around Gatsby’s death at the end. About his murder.”

  Stevie looked up. The Great Gatsby was a murder mystery? Why had no one mentioned this before? She looked at her copy of the book in a feverish sweat.

  “Stevie,” Dr. Quinn said.

  Dr. Quinn could smell sweat and fear, probably from at least a mile away if the wind was right. She narrowed her focus to Stevie, who felt her spine shrink under the pressure. “You’re our resident detective. Did you feel that Gatsby’s death was expected? How do you feel it served the narrative?”

  She had to say something, so she went with what she knew.

  “Murders don’t normally happen at the end of a book,” she said.

  “Perhaps not in murder mysteries,” Dr. Quinn said. “Otherwise there wouldn’t be much for the reader to do. How does the murder function in this story?”

  “Can I say something?” Maris said, sticking up her hand.

  Stevie felt a wave of gratitude spread over her and in the direction of Maris and her blue lips.

  “It’s a discussion,” Dr. Quinn said noncommittally.

  “I felt like his murder was a cop-out.”

  “How so?”

  “I think Gatsby should have had a chance to live through the outcomes,” she said. “I mean, Tom—he’s a racist and an abuser. He and Daisy, they get to live.”

  “And Gatsby pays for their misdeeds,” Dr. Quinn said. “But what I’m asking
is, when do you think Gatsby really died—when the bullet went in, or at some other point in the story?”

  It was like all of this was designed to pick at Stevie’s brain. When did Hayes actually die? When he decided to follow the path to that room filled with gas? And what about the others? When Ellie first made her way into the tunnel? When Fenton looked at the cigarettes on the table? Everything had been lined up for them by some hand, disembodied as the eyes on the cover of this book . . .

  “So what do you say, Stevie?” asked Dr. Quinn.

  “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I don’t know how to tell where it all starts or stops. It’s like a loop.”

  Her answer was sufficiently weird enough to make Dr. Quinn pause and consider her. At first the lingering look predestined a dressing down in front of all her classmates, one that would cause the varnish to drip away from the mahogany bookshelves from the pure shame and embarrassment of it all. But then something changed. Dr. Quinn shifted her weight to her other heel and drummed her manicured hand on the desk. Her examination of Stevie deepened. It felt like Dr. Quinn wanted to pick her apart and examine her clockwork.

  “A loop,” Dr. Quinn repeated. “Something going around in circles. Something that moves back as it tries to move ahead. Something that returns to the past to find the future.”

  “Exactly,” Stevie blurted out. “You have to make sense of the past to figure out the present, and the future.”

  Stevie had no concept at all of what Dr. Quinn was saying, but sometimes, quite by accident, you find yourself vibrating on someone else’s frequency. You can follow the sense of the thing, if not the literal meaning. Sometimes, this is more important and more informative.

  “But are the answers there?” Dr. Quinn said. “That’s certainly what Gatsby thought, and look how he ended up. Dead in his pool. Think about this passage, from right before the shot, as his killer approaches: ‘He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.’”